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Families still 'haunted' by nursing home fire

Tim Barlass

The senior minister taking the service of commemoration tomorrow one year exactly after the fire at the Principal Aged Care home in Quakers Hill will deliver a powerful message to help heal the many left "haunted" and traumatised by the tragedy.

The home had 93 residents including 29 who have died since including 11 who lost their lives as a direct result of the fire.

Rev Geoff Bates will make the address at 6am, the time the fire was well advanced, at Quakers Hill Anglican Church. It is expected to be packed with families, care home staff, representatives of the home's owners and emergency workers.

He said: "This has had the greatest consequences in Sydney of a criminal incident in our generation. Twenty-nine people have died.

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"I know sleepy Sydney doesn't really know that - and that is why I want people to come tomorrow to take a step towards working through this."

Representatives of the emergency services will carry pot plants - rosemary to represent absent friends, blue salvia for wisdom and gerbora for innocence and purity.

Rev Bates said there was a need to understand the enormity of the loss people had experienced and that many had not had the opportunity to come together since the fire.

"People are still traumatised, in hospital and injured from the fire," said Rev Bates. "In addition to that we have staff who have lost residents they considered family and they don't have the job they loved. All the home is now is a scraped piece of dirt, it has been totally demolished. One problem is that because the nursing home doesn't exist any more there is no focal point, there is no place for them to come together.

"The residents families have lost a mother or a father or grandparent, they are just overwhelmed at identifying a mother disfigured and they are reliving this every day. The staff are asking themselves whether they could have done anything [to prevent it]. They are haunted by this. We don't want to forget 18 November 2011 but we want them to find a pathway of healing. The emergency services have been affected deeply - and that is an understatement.

On the morning of the blaze the fire alarm sounded at 4.53am but by the time two fire crews arrived just six minutes later, parts of the single-storey facility were well alight.

Black smoke was billowing out of the building's roof and emergency crews couldn't see their hands in front of their faces through the smoke, the NSW Fire Commissioner Greg Mullins said afterwards.

Roger Kingsley Dean, 35, a nurse at the home, two weeks ago pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of murder in relation to the fire.

Dean had offered to plead guilty to manslaughter but it was rejected by the Crown prosecutor. He also pleaded not guilty to eight counts of recklessly causing grievous bodily harm to eight patients.